Save a Blogger From Begging...Buy Stuff

The one, the only

Sister Site

There but for the grace of God: Bill Murray as Bill Murray might have been in Theodore Malfi’s comedy of forgiveness, St Vincent.

Bill Murray’s a wreck.

He’s playing a wreck, he should look like one. But in St Vincent he doesn’t just look like one. He’s become one. This one. Vin McKenna. Heavy drinker. Heavy smoker. Sixty-something victim of a lifetime of bad habits. Murray looks like the wreck you’d expect a guy like that to look like. He acts like a guy who’s a wreck like that would act. Except that he doesn’t give any sign he’s acting. He’s being himself. And he’s a wreck.

What Murray does in St Vincent is different from what Meryl Streep does in her movies. Streep uses herself as a canvass on which she paints incredibly lifelike portraits of other people. Look closely and you can always spot the artist at work. It’s different from what Philip Seymour Hoffman did. Hoffman found a way to turn every character into a version of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a technique based on the ideas that situation and circumstances create character, that people are as alike as they are different, and much of who we are is determined by how we react to who and what are acting upon us. This is how leading men and leading women---movie stars---who are great actors tend to work and it’s what causes people who don’t know better to say “Oh he’s just playing himself again.” Because their characters look like movie stars playing them, people tend to see only the movie stars. Hoffman looked like a character so people would say he was a great character actor. Which he was. But here I think Murray is just playing himself.

But not the self his fans know. Maybe not the self anyone but Murray knows, that secret self we all have, the one we’re afraid to let anyone else see because we’re afraid they’d recoil in horror or disgust or contempt or hilarity, and Murray’s been brave enough to let that self show. It’s possible it’s a self Murray didn’t know was in him until he read the script. I don’t know, of course, but I imagine him saying to himself, I know this guy. I could have been this guy. In another life I am this guy.

The accent’s different, that’s all. Brooklyn not Chicago. Otherwise, Vin is Murray and Murray is Vin. Same born rebel as wiseguy attitude. Same subversive impulses. Same way of sounding sincere when he’s mocking you, same way of sounding like he’s mocking when he’s being sincere. Same insouciant refusal to care what others think of him and adjust his behavior accordingly. What Vin doesn’t have is the money and fame that allows Murray to get away with it. And he’s probably never traveled in circles where this behavior would make him a hero. More likely it’s always marked him as a trouble-making pain in the ass. But what he’s really missing and has never had is Murray’s luck.

Vin has had some luck. But it’s the luck of a survivor, not the kind of luck that makes you successful except in the sense you somehow manage to get by and keep going until the next set of troubles, sorrows, catastrophes, and failures come along.

The small graces and favors that attended Murray at the right time in the right place, the good things that happened, the bad things that didn’t, the family he was blessed with, the friendships he was able to make, the teachers who were there when he needed them, the sharp-eyed mentors who saw something in this kid, all the coincidental, accidental, and serendipitous moments that taken together determine our fate, all the luck---which the vain and conceited deny is luck and boastfully claim as the result of their own unaided and unsupported effort---Murray enjoyed, Vin missed out on.

The result is that after a life of probably daily struggle, disappointment, frustration, and reversal if not outright failure, he’s alone, broke, bitter, and worn-out, without anyone to call on for help or even moral support, and almost too tired and too full of self-loathing to care.

He can’t be bothered.

He can’t be bothered to look out for himself. He can’t even be bothered to dress properly. He can’t be bothered to concern himself about other people. He can’t be bothered to to take their feelings into account. He’s rude. He’s gratuitously insulting. He seems to go out of his way to offend people he needs on his side.

He’s selfish. He’s conniving. He’s opportunistic. He takes on a babysitting job because it’s an opportunity to make some money quickly without having to do real work for it. When he sees the boy’s mother is desperate, he takes advantage and charges her more than he can guess she can comfortably afford.

And it seems that all that’s keeping him going is stubbornness and spite.

He’s a physical and spiritual wreck.

And Bill Murray plays this guy as if he is this guy.

It’s a true There But for the Grace of God Go I performance. The Catholic version. Not the Calvinist version. The Calvinist version is a smug, self-congratulatory I’m favored by God with an underlying terror that that favor will be withdrawn without warning or apparent reason. The Catholic version is I’m lucky and the luck can run out but there’s no terror because the Catholic God never withdraws his favor. His son and his son’s Mother and an entire calendar of saints won’t let him. The Calvinist version blames the unfavored and disfavored. The Catholic version teaches the lucky to have pity and compassion for the unlucky. One is judgmental. The other is charitable. St Vincent, as if you couldn’t guess from the title, is a very Catholic movie.

Maybe the best Catholic movie ever made, after John Huston’s The Dead.

I don’t mean that it’s Catholic in the way of Going My Way or Song of Bernadette. There’s no idealizing of the One True Church or sentimentalizing of its communicants. I don’t mean it’s a religious movie. God is named but he’s not worshiped. Faith doesn’t seem to motivate any of the characters, not even the ones whose business is spreading the faith. And I don’t mean it’s a movie about Catholics doing Catholic-ish things. Nobody goes to Confession. Nobody goes to Mass. One of the main supporting characters is a priest, but he’s no Bing Crosby or Pat O’Brien or Spencer Tracy or Karl Malden or even a Montgomery Clift, and he’s certainly no Henry Fonda. He’s just a tired man trying to keep his spirits up and his faith in himself intact while doing a thankless job as best he can. The twelve year old boy Vin babysits, Oliver Bronstein, goes to a Catholic school but he’s not Catholic. He doesn’t know what he is. What religion to raise him in is another thing his divorcing parents failed to work out between them. “I think I’m Jewish,” he tells his teacher. His religious ed class’ final project is to research the life of someone who might be a living saint and present what amounts to a hagiography. But the pedagogic goal of the project seems to be for the kids to teach themselves how to use Power Point.

The stated goal is to learn what it means to be a saint. The movie’s take on this is that the first requirement of a saint is to recognize that we are all sinners, including the few of us who might qualify as saints, and to make allowances. Among other things, a saint is someone who understands and forgives.

I’m still enough of a papist to want to claim that as a Catholic theme. But it’s not particularly. What it is is humane.

Vin takes in Oliver because he’s desperate for cash. He’s reached the limit of his credit line on his reverse mortgage. His checking account’s overdrawn. He owes money right and left. If he had any savings they’re long gone. He’s broke and going broker. And we know how he got that way. He drinks. He smokes. He gambles. He goes to strip clubs and hires hookers. As Republicans keeping telling us, money problems are caused by defects in character. You’re broke, it’s your own fault. You screwed up, screwed yourself. Actions have consequences, live with them. And watching Vin self-indulge and self-destruct, it’s hard not to blame him, and because he’s such a jerk, it’s hard not to root for his continued downward slide. And maybe, we think---hope---it’ll wake him up, hitting bottom. Force him to change his ways. Though there’s reason to doubt a jerk like Vin can change.

But, like I said, this is a Catholic movie. The point isn’t redemption, it’s forgiveness. Director and screenwriter Theodore Melfi tries our patience detailing Vin’s unapologetic bad behavior and, scene in and scene out, tempts us to give up on him as a bad bet. But if we’re good Catholics---good Christians, good Jews, good Hindus, good Muslims, good Buddhists, good people, or at least kind-hearted people---we know to withhold judgment.

Oliver knows how to do this. In his experience, there’s always another side of the story, a side nobody’s telling. He knows that his mother’s story and his father’s story about the failure of their marriage don’t match up. More important, neither’s story matches what he’s seen for himself. It’s not that he’s that intuitive. He’s observant. And when he starts observing Vin, he starts seeing there’s a side to Vin’s story Vin won’t tell, maybe can’t tell, maybe because he’s too proud or too stubborn, maybe because it’s too painful, maybe because he sees no point to telling it---Vin’s least favorite expression is “It is what it is.” He hates it because he’s convinced it’s used as an excuse to refuse to try to help others: Wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can do….because I don’t want to do anything. But can mean something else and that something else is Vin’s guiding philosophy: Things go wrong. There’s nothing you can do to change that. You don’t complain. You deal.---maybe because it’s a side Vin himself doesn’t see. In order to tell it, he’d first have to see himself in a different light. He’d have to think of himself as a different kind of person. A good person. Or a not too awful one, at least. And he’s never thought of himself that way. There used to be someone who thought of him that way and because he thought the world of her, he could think a little better of himself for her sake. But she’s not around anymore.

Oliver is, though.

Murray’s is the performance the movie’s built upon, but Jaeden Lieberher as Oliver makes St Vincent work.

Although Vin becomes the subject of Oliver’s living saints project, if there’s a character in St Vincent who’s anything close to a saint it’s Oliver. But there’s nothing particularly saintly about Lieberher’s performance. Nothing over cute or cloying either. Nothing nice. He makes no overt play for our sympathy or approval. His Oliver is just a decent, well-meaning kid who’s learned how to make the best of bad situations and the best way he’s found is not to hold other people’s mistakes and bad behavior against them. He takes them for what they are and hopes they’ll do the same for him. Not that he’s a doormat. There’s only so much he’ll put up with. It’s just he’s got enough to worry about without trying to fix people. It is what it is, is his philosophy too, but Lieberher doesn’t play this as resignation, cynicism, or surrender. It’s simply a realistic acceptance of how people are. And in his case it works to get people to reveal other, better sides of themselves.

Lieberher’s Oliver isn’t particularly insightful or empathetic. But he’s intelligent and he’s interested or he makes himself interested. Stuck with Vin for hours on end, dragged along on Vin’s errands with no regard on Vin’s part for the effect on a ten year old kid, having to spend time at the race track watching Vin lose, having to wait and watch while Vin makes unexplained but obviously painful visits to a nursing home, having to sit on a stool next to him when they stop off at Vin’s favorite bar on the way home and watch Vin not watch his drinking, Oliver distracts himself from his own loneliness and boredom by paying attention. He quickly starts to pick up on things. Nothing we haven’t picked up on ourselves already but Oliver puts them together so they add up to more than an explanation or an excuse for Vin.

Murray and Lieberher are terrific, separate and together. But Melissa McCarthy as Oliver’s harried and distracted mother, Maggie, an MRI technician who’s apparently much better at her job than she is at being a parent, surprised me. I still haven’t seen Bridesmaids and I don’t watch Mike & Molly. Up til now I only knew her from endlessly repeated trailers and television ads for Identity Thief and Tammy. Judging by her work in St Vincent, I expect she’s on her way to being what Bill Murray is, a great actor who happened to get started and establish a reputation playing clowns.

Maggie is a loving mother and a devoted mother and probably, under better circumstances, a very good mother, but under the current circumstances she’s failing Oliver and herself by indulging herself in the role of wronged ex-wife. And she was wronged. The movie doesn’t blame her for the breakup of her marriage. Her on his way to be ex-husband did her dirt. But he was a good father if a lousy husband and in fleeing the marriage she didn’t take Oliver’s feelings and needs into account. She didn’t have a plan. Now it’s causing everyone, including herself, extra hardship and pain. But she’s like her son in being able to make the best of bad situations and in being willing to treat everybody else---except Oliver’s father---the way she’d like them to treat her. McCarthy conveys Maggie’s basic decency while doing no special pleading in defense of her failings and she lets us see Maggie’s sadness, frustration, and fear while making clear her outward cheerfulness and hopefulness aren’t just defenses but real strengths, except when they’re weaknesses.

In St Vincent, something similar is going on with Maggie as with Vin. Under other circumstances, some of Vin’s vices would be only mildly bad habits. And when we begin to understand his current circumstances, “vices” stops seeming like the right word. Under her current circumstances, some of Maggie’s better qualities, qualities that used to look like virtues have begun to look like, not vices, but worrisomely self-destructive character flaws. And this is the point. Since none of us can know when our own circumstances might change for the worse and what that change might bring out in us or damp down, we need to hold off on judging others whose luck has failed them until we know their circumstances, and keeping in mind that there but for the grace of God, maybe withhold judgment and do what we can in the way of offering the help and comfort we hope we’ll be offered when our own luck fails.

Depending on how you look at it, St Vincent is a comedy with a deep undercurrent of sadness or a sad movie with a comic surface. Either way, its message is how life can be so funny you want to cry or so sad you can only laugh. This is a theme I think of as Jewish, based on what I observed in my friends and neighbors growing up. But really it’s like what I said about the Catholic themes.

They’re not particularly Jewish or Catholic.

What they are is human.

As Vin’s less than friendly neighborhood bookie, Terrence Howard expands upon a theme he began composing in The Butler: Sleazeballs I Have Known. Chris O’Dowd plays the Christian Brother who teaches religious ed at Oliver’s school and assigns the saints project, a kindly and faithful priest but somewhat discouraged teacher who deals with his students’ indifference and recalcitrance with an overt but ironically expressed hostility that makes them laugh at themselves before they can laugh at him. And Naomi Watts, overdoing it a bit with a Bad news for Moose and Squirrel accent, plays Daka, Vin’s stripper and prostitute Russian immigrant girlfriend who is better expressing her affections through anger and guilt-tripping than through sex. Daka is a devout mercenary but there’s nothing that says self-interest is incompatible with charity and Watts mixes Daka’s greed and generosity to create a plausibly decent person doing what she has to to get by while shielding herself behind a caricature.

________________________________

Penitential update: Instead of saying an Our Father and three Hail Marys, read Matt Fagerholm’s interview with St Vincent’s director and writer Ted Melfi at rogerebert.com, Life is in the Middle.

“People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle. What’s bad about Oliver’s father? He fell out of love with his wife and he cheated on her. Is that bad? Yeah, cheating on her is bad, but falling out of love isn’t bad. It happens. Maggie is not a good mom and not a bad mom. She’s a mom. There’s heaven and hell in everyone…

“It’s what Pope Francis is saying. He’s saying that the church is a hospital for those who are sick. People of every faith can come there and find help, support, food, love.”

“You are selfish and unsentimental.” “You say that like it was a bad thing.” “On the contrary.” Philip Friedman (Jason Schwartzman, left) is tutored on how to be a great novelist by his literary idol, Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce) in Alex Ross Perry’s darkly satirical film about the writing life, Listen Up Philip.

It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago---I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman---when I arrived at his hideaway to greet the great man. The clapboard farmhouse was at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires, yet the figure who emerged from the study to bestow a ceremonious greeting wore a gabardine suit, a knitted blue tie clipped to a white shirt by an unadorned silver clasp, and well-brushed ministerial black shoes that made me think of him stepping down from a shoeshine stand rather than from the high altar of art. Before I had composure enough to notice the commanding, autocratic angle at which he held his chin, or the regal, meticulous, rather dainty care he took to arrange his clothes before sitting---to notice anything, really, other than that I had miraculously made it from my unliterary origins to here, to him---my impression was that E.I. Lonoff looked more like the local superintendent of schools than the region’s most original storyteller since Melville and Hawthorne.

Prologue

Ike Zimmerman, the literary hero of Philip Friedman, the young novelist who’s the protagonist of the clever and darkly satirical (but seemingly deliberately unfunny) pseudo-documentary portrait of writers as bitter young and old men,Listen Up Philip, the best adaptation of a Philip Roth novel that Roth hasn’t written, doesn’t make as distinguished, dignified, and gentlemanly first impression as as E.I. Lonoff makes upon young Nathan Zuckerman in Roth’s The Ghost Writer. Ike is not meticulous about his dress or his manners. He’s rumpled, irritable, overbearing and demanding rather than commanding. Autocratic is both too harsh and too mild a word to describe his particular sort of domestic tyrant. And there’s no mistaking him for anything but a writer. But as soon as Ike invites Philip to come visit him at his house in the country, where a mysterious and alluring young woman awaits to capture Philip’s imagination, the parallels and allusions, and parallels and allusions within the parallels and allusions, are made clear.

The ghost writer, ghost writers, of Listen Up Philip are Roth and his many literary alter-egos whose spirits haunt the plot from beginning to end.

Chapter One.

The game is given away graphically early on and throughout, in the lettering style of the credits and in the glimpses of the covers of some of Ike’s early books which recreate the covers of the novels Roth published in the 1970s that made him a bestselling novelist with a salacious reputation, The Breast, My Life as A Man, Our Gang, The Great American Novel,Portnoy’s Complaint, the paperback editions of which I bought when I was a kid deciding it was time for me to read what the grownups were reading. But you can’t name one of your novelist main characters Philip and the other a near-homophone to Zuckerman and then have them re-enact part of the plot of The Ghost Writer without bringing Philip Roth and his novels and characters into your movie about the trials and tribulations of the literary life in a significant and signifying way.

Philip (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t an exact stand-in for a young Philip Roth or even a young Nathan Zuckerman. He’s too unfocused, too undisciplined, and, I hope, too unlikeable. And if Ike (Jonathan Pryce) is an older version of Zuckerman, it depends on which Nathan Zuckerman you’re talking about.

But since all the Zuckermans are alter-egos for Philip Roth, except for the Zuckerman of My Life as a Man, who’s an alter-ego for that novel’s “author”, the writer Peter Tarnopol, but who is himself an alter-ego for Roth, it doesn’t matter which. At one, two, or three removes, Ike is a stand-in for Philip Roth.

But then that depends on which Philip Roth. Philip Roth has used Philip Roth as a stand-in for Philip Roth.

The question is, is Ike a fictionalized version of Philip Roth or a fictionalized version of Philip Roth’s fictionalized version of Philip Roth?

And even though Philip isn’t much like Philip Roth or Nathan Zuckerman he is a younger double of Ike which makes him a double of a double for Roth.

So who’s who and who’s what?

This ambiguity of identity and the questions it raises about the relationship between a writer and his fiction and between fiction and real life are concepts that amused Roth throughout the middle period of his career and he used them as central conceits in My Life As a Man, the Zuckerman Bound series, Deception, The Counterlife, and Operation Shylock. (The Zuckerman who narrates the later trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain lives in a different and more conventional, less meta- literary universe.) This is why I called Listen Up Philip an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel that Philip Roth happened not to write. He might have written one like it: a sequel to The Ghost Writer (instead of the sequel he did write, Exit Ghost, or in addition to it), in which Nathan Zuckerman finds himself reliving an important episode from his past only this time instead of being the young writer looking at his possible future self, he’s the old writer looking on in horror and dread as a version of himself as a young man verges on throwing away his chance to have a career like the old man’s by becoming prematurely too much like the old man himself.

The question is, who’s the intended audience for this? Who goes to the movies for an hour and half of literary exegesis?

People like me, I suppose, the more than casual readers of contemporary non-genre fiction, religious readers of the New York Times Book Reviews, enthusiastic attendees of author readings and book signings, followers of the latest trends, fads, feuds, and spats among the literati. We’re the most likely to get it, to recognize, for example, that a novelist rival of Philip’s, a poseur and a phony and possibly a hack, has been given Jonathan Franzen’s glasses and David Foster Wallace’s fate and find that funny in a it’d be too cruel to laugh way, and to get a kick out of trying to identify which books of Ike’s are references to which books of Roth’s.

Also fans of Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. I’ll get to that.

And fans of Jason Schwartzman and Bored to Death. I’ll get to that too.

But Listen Up Philip is more than just an extended in-joke for fans of Philip Roth in particular and contemporary fiction an observers of the current literary scene in general.

In fact, it may be too much for them to take, because its writer characters are appalling.

If you want to think well of writers and dream wistfully of the writing life, Listen Up Philip is not your movie.

Chapter Two.

Both Philip and Ike are mean, bitter, jealous, gratuitously insulting---and because they’re writers and brilliant with words their insults are smart, witty, and devastatingly exact---emotionally abusive, destructive, deliberately hurtful towards everyone around them (except each other), self-sabotaging, and pathologically self-absorbed.

They’re also tremendous bores.

When Philip arrives at Ike’s house in the country, the mysterious and alluring young woman there to meet him isn’t a contemporary version of Ann Frank or someone Philip can make fictional hay with by pretending to convince himself she’s Ann Frank. She’s simply Ike’s estranged daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter) who immediately recognizes the basis of the affinity between the old and the young writers and how they complement and double each other.

Speaking of her father she says to Philip, “I’m glad he’s replaced himself with a younger surrogate to handle the forlorn moping.”

It’s an old, old story: artists and writers set on self-destruct. How many movies, plays, and novels have been about some talented but tormented genius coming to wrack and ruin through booze, through drugs, through romantic misadventure, by being spoiled by fame, by being broken by failure? But I can’t think of another movie in which the artist-hero sets out to destroy himself simply by being relentlessly, insistently, childishly, perversely, and repetitively just himself.

Who wants to sit through one hundred and nine minutes of that?

People like me again, I suppose. Neurotic intellectual-types with unrealized literary ambitions who are grateful to be told it’s ok to sneer at ourselves for ever having wanted to be like that but who can’t sneer because we were like that and probably still are. We’re the people most likely to be horrified by the film in the way someone will be horrified by a photo of himself he thinks is grotesquely unflattering but which all his friends tell him is the best picture of him ever taken, the one most like him.

We want to see ourselves and our literary heroes caricatured as vain and pretentious, moral, intellectual, and artistic frauds. Listen Up Philip provides Schadenfreude for the self-infatuated. It’s a mirror held up to those for whom self-loathing is practically our default emotion and---truthfully?---a form of self-love.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Probably it’s me.

Chapter Three.

Anticipating the approaching publication of his second novel, which he knows to be a creative leap forward from his first and has good reason to think will be a commercial and critical success, Philip Friedman---Philip Lewis Friedman. He insists people use his middle name not as if there might be another Philip Friedman he doesn’t want to be confused with or as if leaving out the Lewis was akin to mispronouncing Philip or Friedman, but as if correcting them on a matter of fact they shouldn’t need to have corrected and that they do can only mean they’re stupid---has been seized by an existential despair. It doesn’t matter how good the novel is or how successful it will be or make him. It won’t be enough because he has discerned a central truth about the world.

Nobody cares.

Not enough.

Nobody, not even his girlfriend---especially, he thinks, not his girlfriend---cares enough to put him at the center of their private universes.

Where he’s come to doubt he belongs anyway.

In his anger, he’s lashing out, as only the most morbidly narcissistic and passive-aggressive can, by sabotaging his relationships with his girlfriend, his best friend, his editor and agent, other writers who might be valued colleagues, and with his own writing (by not writing).

Chapter Four.

Philip’s grievance with the world stems from his not having accepted a central fact about the life of an artist.

If you’re lucky you’ll have some true believers among your family and friends. They’ll support you and encourage you and love what you do. They’ll cheer your success and cry with you over your failures.

If you’re lucky in another way, someone important to you will be overtly hostile to your dreams and ambitions. They’ll dismiss your work, deny you have the talent or the character or the ability to make your own luck. They’ll make you want to show them and keep on showing them. They’ll drive you on with their doubt.

But most people you care about and who you thought cared about you will be worse than indifferent.

They won’t even notice you’re doing what you’re doing.

You’ll tell them about your latest success and it’ll just remind them to tell you, “Did you hear about cousin Sue’s daughter? She made the volleyball team.” Confess your frustration, lament a failure, express self-doubt and they’ll reply, “I had to take the cat to the vet the other day. Something in his eye,” not as if the cat is as important as your problems and pains or even more important, but as if you haven’t said anything about your problems and pains but instead asked about the cat, as if the cat was the only thing that could be important to you. It’ll be as if there’s nothing going on in your life and you have nothing to occupy your time or thoughts but what’s going on in their lives. It would be arrogant to say they become a waste of your time, but it’d also be inaccurate. What happens is they act as if your job is to let them waste your time, because you have so much time to waste. They’ll only ever discuss art or literature with you is when they want to let you know what a great book by somebody else they just read or about a fascinating interview they saw on TV with somebody else or how they heard that a painting, again by somebody else, somebody you know to be second-rate, sold for gobs and gobs of money.

It’ll be as if they’re denying to themselves you are an artist and are insisting you let them deny it to the point of denying it to yourself. You won’t be allowed to think of yourself as an artist around them. You won’t be able to work around them.

And because they’re people who are important to you and you care about them and what they think, you will start to wonder if they’re right, if the reason they won’t acknowledge what you are and what you do is that it’s not worth acknowledging, and not because you’re not good at what you’re trying to do, although there’s that, but because you’re not really doing anything. There’s nothing for them to acknowledge.

And if you don’t get away from these people, if you can’t put them out of your head, more and more you will act as if you aren’t doing anything by…not doing anything.

Philip can’t get away from people like this or put them out of his head. They’re everywhere he goes and everywhere he will ever go and everyone he knows and will ever meet.

But he has another, more serious problem.

It’s hard for anyone to care about his work because it’s hard for anyone to care about him.

Chapter Five.

As I said earlier, Philip is appalling. Mean, bitter, spiteful, gratuitously insulting and emotionally abusive. He’s impossible to please. As soon as he likes or begins to enjoy something, he decides to hate it. This happens with him with people too. And his own writing.

Philip acts like many a successful artist, as if great talent is a license to be selfish, self-serving, demanding, entitled to deference and adoration, to act like a spoiled, self-important jerk. The thing with him, though, it’s not an act. He actually is a jerk. He knows this about himself, too, but refuses to try to change on the grounds that it might get in the way of his being a writer. But it’s not his writing that seems important to him and needs protecting, it’s his freedom to be a jerk. It’s seems likely that became a writer because it would give him the freedom to be a jerk.

On top of this, he’s paranoid.

Philip suspects he’s not a very good writer. Not that he’s bad. Not that he’s mediocre. Not that he isn’t good. Just not very good, as in destined for greatness. This causes him to wonder if he might be a fraud, since his whole professional life has been built on the premise that he’s destined for greatness. So he’s on the lookout for signs that people don’t think of him as a writer and don’t care about his work. And he finds those signs in everyone and then he gets angry at them, both for their stupidity in failing to appreciate his genius and for causing him to doubt himself.

But, by the same token, he gets angry at anyone who does seem to appreciate his genius or expresses admiration for his published work. He treats them as if in telling him how much they like his writing they’ve confessed to an unpardonable sin. He maliciously leads on a beautiful young assistant at his publisher’s who has a crush on him and then rejects her in mid-kiss. He refuses to even try to make friends with his colleagues at the college where Ike has secured him a gig teaching creative writing, apparently on the Groucho principle of not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member, and considers resigning in the middle of the term just for spite. He belittles his students in class and when one of them persists in respecting him anyway and tries to persuade him to take her on as a protégé he flat out tells her he hasn’t read any of the stories she’s submitted for class, implies he doesn’t ever intend to, refuses to write her a recommendation for an internship, and makes it clear she’s wasting her time trying to become a writer and his time by asking him to treat her as one. Against the odds and all reason, one of his colleagues, a professor of French literature, falls in love with him, but, after reciprocating for a little while, he abruptly breaks things off apparently because their romance was making them both happy. Then he whines about how nobody likes him.

But why would they? How could they? There’s no reason. No reason for anyone to like him. No reason that we can see for anybody to have ever liked him. No reason for us to like him except on the humane grounds that somebody has to. As far as we can tell, he’s gone through life since college being vociferously unhappy and dissatisfied with everybody and everything, including himself and his writing, and expecting people to admire him for this as if it proves his honesty, intellectual courage, and moral and and mental superiority. All it does is make others unhappy and dissatisfied and what makes it worse---actively cruel, in fact---is that he knows what he’s doing and still won’t cut it out.

Chapter Six.

Astoundingly, there are people who like him or have liked him, loved him, in fact. And they’re not crazy or stupid or overtly masochistic.

We meet two of his former girlfriends and both seem smart and well-adjusted, although the main evidence of their intelligence and mental health is how cheerful and relieved both appear at having Philip gone from their lives. His current girlfriend is even smarter and more put together. Her name is Ashley and she’s a talented artist in her own right, a photographer beginning to achieve some success herself (but unlike Philip enjoying it). She’s good natured, outgoing, attractive, and not just because she’s played by a golden and glowing Elisabeth Moss but because she is one of those energetic and engaged people who take a physical delight in going about their daily lives, and there’s no doubt she could and should be doing better in the boyfriend department. But she loves Philip and is committed to their relationship and she’s confused and hurt when he decides to accept Ike’s invitation and spend the summer apart from her. Her fidelity to Philip, who she admits treats her “in a way that only points out how meaningless” she is, is baffling. Even though there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with her, we can’t help wondering, What’s wrong with her?

Then, while Philip extends his stay at Ike’s, leaving Ashley feeing even more abandoned and rejected, she adopts a cat to keep her company and when we see her doting on the cat we begin to understand.

Chapter Seven.

We all know a certain type of cat person. They like to tell you how loving, attentive, playful, and loyal their cat is, like a dog, really, they’ll say. But when you see them together the cat turns out not to be any of those things. It’ll be content to loll in its owner’s arms and soak up the love and attention without giving any sign it notices or cares in return. And the owners don’t seem to notice their cat’s languid indifference. They’ll act as if the cat’s giving them a great gift by deigning to be fussed over, coddled, and carried about like a Teddy Bear or baby doll for grownups, as if it’s doing them a great favor by allowing them to attend to its every need while needing nothing for themselves in return but the occasional contented purr. They’ll cuddle it, hug it, pet it, scratch its ears, rub its belly, talk baby talk at it, and, although the cat will look too bored to even work up the effort to yawn, they’ll act as if the cat was responding with lavish shows of grateful affection.

Ashley is that kind of cat person and Philip is a cat.

Chapter Eight.

Someone else cares for Philip. Someone who is not that type of cat person. Ike.

Bastard that he is, Ike is not entirely with sympathy or affection. He may have ceased to love his real daughter, if he ever did love her, but he is leaning towards loving Philip as a surrogate son, in his way, at any rate, which is the way of an egotistical and selfish father doting on his favorite who is favored because the old man sees him as his replacement in whom and through whom he expects to live on after death.

His affection for Philip is cold-hearted, self-serving, and self-flattering. It’s based on a reversal of Philip’s usual effect on people:typically people don’t care about Philip’s writing because they don’t care about him; Ike cares about Philip because he cares about nothing except Philip’s writing.

To Ike, you are the work you do. He’s interested in you to the degree your work interests him. And he has an extremely limited idea of what work is and what makes it worth doing and worth his attention, which seems to be based on how closely it resembles the work he’s done as a great American writer. If he doesn’t see the work you do as comparable to the work he does, he’s not interested. In fact, he’s contemptuous and dismissive. This explains his treatment of Melanie.

Of course, what Ike cares most about in Philip’s writing is its resemblance to his own.

In caring for Philip, Ike is caring for himself, a task he finds as difficult as everyone else who has to put up with him.

Ike is a cold-hearted, miserable son of a bitch, as relentless and ruthless as Philip in inflicting his misery on others. Like Philip he’s an emotional sado-masochist, seeming to need to hurt others because it hurts him to do it and he wants that pain. But Pryce makes Ike’s vicious expressions of misanthropy, cynicism, nihilism, self-imposed alienation, and emotional cruelty in the service of beating back all claims on his affections sound like statements of self-evident principle. There’s the ring of moral decency in his meanest and most self-aggrandizing one-liners. Of his many estranged friends, once-valued colleagues, and formerly devoted students he declares, “Having once known me will always be the the most interesting thing about them,” and coming from Pryce it sounds not like an insult but like exactly what Ike intends, an indictment of their inexcusable weakness of character. When he decides he can’t bear Melanie’s company any more because she’s being “a pain in the ass” by insisting he treat her with some kindness, she being his daughter, after all, and tosses her out of the house, he tells her “I don’t know if I can continue to accommodate you here”and it sounds so reasonably and diplomatically put you almost want to congratulate him on his tact.

And Pryce gives Ike a residual measure of warmth and a vestigial capacity to enjoy life’s little pleasures that Philip doesn’t have, which makes us think or at least wish that once upon a time Ike was a nicer, more likeable person and a writer whose work was admirable for more than its intellectual heft.

Philip’s fiction, we suspect, is like his hero’s in being infinitely clever and knowing and full of an acerbic wit. But we can believe that Ike’s fiction, the best of it, at any rate, the stuff he wrote when he was in his prime, was infused with an intensity of feeling that ranged beyond anger and self-regard and revealed a moral and emotional intelligence that carried readers away.

That doesn’t preclude his having been a louse back then. It just suggests that he was once capable of not being a louse or not as terrible a louse. But however decent-hearted he might have been at one time, it’s all in the now distant past and Pryce makes it plain that it’s going to stay there. This is not a man who’s going to be redeemed, even if he wanted to be, which he decidedly doesn’t.

Chapter Nine.

Pryce as Ike’s almost loving Philip and Ritter as Melanie’s not out and out loathing him are about all Philip has going for him in engaging our sympathies and keeping us sitting still to watch his story play out on screen.

In a story with such an unsympathetic protagonist you might expect to find a rooting interest in his antagonists or his victims. The trouble here is that Philip has no worthy antagonists ---the way he deals with the rival novelist, the Jonathan David Foster Franzen character, gives us a clue that he’s adept at avoiding involvement, professional and personal, with anyone who might pose a threat to his vanity or stand up to his cruelties---and his victims have flaws of their own apart that make them difficult difficult to sympathize with.

An exception is Norm, an old novelist friend of Ike’s, played by Yusef Bulos. He appears only briefly, but he warms up the movie while he’s on screen, quietly and modestly reproving both Ike and Philip by demonstrating that’s is possible to be a great and famous writer and still be a mensch.

Just about every other character, however, is obnoxious to some degree past bearable and there’s no good reason to care about them or be interested in them except that they are all human and afflicted by the human stain, which may be the most Rothian thing about the movie.

The rival novelist (Keith Poulson) seems too proud of his reputation as a kind and decent person unspoiled to actually be kind and decent. Philip’s former girlfriends (Samantha Jacober and Kate Lyn Sheil) seem nice but only nice enough and nice in that way that’s often a pale and lazy substitute for genuine decency. The publisher’s assistant Philip rejects and insults in mid-kiss (Dree Hemingway) seems to want Philip because others want him. The fact he has a longtime girlfriend turns her on. The student whose dreams Philip casually crushes (Maïté Alina) is on the make. She’s an opportunist and having Philip as her teacher is an opportunity. The French professor (Joséphine de La Baume) is a calculating careerist but a sneaky one. She knows how to sabotage other people’s careers without being seen as a saboteur. She’s also self-destructive. In falling for Philip she seems to be deliberately foiling her own scheming and in taking him on as her lover she’s getting the punishment she thinks she deserves.

Even the two female leading female characters, Melanie and Ashley, wronged and abused as they are by the most important men in their lives, make problematic heroines.

Melanie is problematic because we only ever see her in the company of Philip or Ike or both and they’re crazy-makers with a knack for bringing out the worst in others. But if this is Melanie at her worst then we have to think that her best must be pretty darn good. She’s bitter and acerbic in self-defense and Ritter handles Melanie’s bitterness and acerbity with wit and a quiet ferocity without letting the bitterness and acerbity define her.

Ashley is problematic in another way. She’s a victim who looks like she ought to be a heroine. Moss appears harder than she does on Mad Men, and I mean harder in bone and muscle as well as in spirit. She’s filled out in a way that prefigures a sturdy middle-age and in Listen Up Philip she looks more like a former college lacrosse player than the dancer she was. The effect is that next to Philip she comes across as too old---the now thirty-four year old Schwartzman looks to be the same size he was when he starred in Rushmore sixteen years ago---to be putting up with the perpetually adolescent Philip. That Philip can reduce someone this mature, strong, and intelligent to tears is a proof of his maliciousness. That someone this mature, strong, and intelligent sticks around for him to do it is possible evidence of her masochism. Anybody can be victimized by a malignant personality, but we can’t help thinking Ashley knows better and could resist if she wanted to.

With Philip away, she’s lonely and adrift, but she’s also relaxed and, when she’s not thinking about him, happy, and we’re glad for her but also worried for her because of what might happen when Philip comes back. This is one romantic comedy in which we root for the guy not to get the girl. The suspense is in our wondering if Ashley will gather the strength to throw the bum out of her life once and for all, and once we see how she is with cats we have reason to doubt that she will.

Chapter Ten.

Everyone Philip encounters is such a poor specimen that we begin to wonder if maybe he’s right about people. Perhaps his alienation and misanthropy are justified. He’s a writer after all, a talented one, even if he’s not as talented as he believes he should be, and writers are notoriously insightful when it comes to analyzing character (everyone’s but their own, usually). If you’ve spent any time in the company of writers you know one of the most unsettling things that can happen to you is to catch one of them studying you.

But this is Philip, after all. He’s an expert at seeing the worst in people and then bringing it out in them just to prove himself right. So we can’t be sure: Is it him? Is it them? Is it both? Is it us? Where’s the truth here?

Chapter Eleven.

For most of the movie, Listen Up Philip sticks to Philip’s point of view and how reliable is Philip? We don’t get much help from the narrator---Didn’t I mention there’s a narrator? I’ll get to him---who affects objectivity but is too knowing in a way that makes him sound as if he’s holding an awful lot back. He also sounds written. And that raises the question, Written by whom? The movie’s director and screenwriter, Alex Ross Perry, of course, but who is Perry writing as? Himself? “Himself”? The director and writer of the documentary Listen Up Philip supposedly is? And is that documentary a real thing? It could be a product of Philip’s imagination. He’s the only one we can imagine being interested in such a documentary. That would make Philip the narrator of the movie or, rather, the narrator of the narrator. Just who is telling this story?

Who is telling the story of any story?

The inherent unreliability of storytelling and storytellers is another very Rothian theme at work in Listen Up Philip.

Chapter Twelve.

What makes all these characters compelling or at least worth paying attention to is they are constructs of a very smart, very witty, very literary script and are brought to life by an ensemble of extremely talented, intelligent, and subtle actors. But what really saves them in our eyes, literally, is that we see them through a camera under the sly and mind-games-playing direction of Alex Ross Perry.

Unlike in The Office and Parks and Recreation, the fake documentary conceit isn’t simply a device to let characters talk about themselves or get around holes in the plot or hide the fact that there isn’t a plot. It’s intrinsic to the storytelling. In fact, that’s the point: it is storytelling. Perry’s calling attention to Listen Up Philip as a told story.

But like I said, who’s telling the story?

Who’s supposed to be behind the camera? Who wrote the script? Who wrote the narrator’s lines? Who is the narrator? Perry makes artful use of him, whoever he is. Perry lets him drone on at the top of the film until just past the point where we’re screaming for him to shut up and let us focus on the characters and the main action and then lets him fall silent until just past the point when we’re begging for him to come back and give us some relief from focusing on these characters. Perry keeps up the pattern throughout and by about midway through we’ve not just grown used to the narrator’s intrusions, we’re looking forward to them for his sake. He’s grown on us as a character. In fact he’s the most likeable character in the movie, whoever he is.

It helps that he has the sonorous baritone voice of Eric Bogosian.

Wes Anderson likes to play with narrators, onscreen and off, named and unknown, to call attention to his movies as told stories too. And there are other Anderson influences at work in Listen Up Philip, not the least of which is the casting of one of Anderson’s favorite actors from his stock company of players as the lead playing the sort of oblivious egotist Anderson likes to put at the center of his movies. But the main stylistic influence that struck me was Woody Allen’s.

Chapter Thirteen.

Listen Up Philip looks and sounds like Allen’s two best films from the 1980s, Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s set among the same cohort of New York pseudo-intellectuals and is about people too smart for their own good who should and do know better but behave badly anyway, although nobody in Listen Up Philip tries to get away with murder. And there’s the fact that Allen did his own take on Roth in 1997’s even darker but funnier and more succinct (and I think underappreciated) down-there-on-a-visit---there being the main character’s private hell where Billy Crystal reigns as the Devil---Deconstructing Harry.

But the fake documentary and the narrator are the giveaways.

The characters are completely unaware they’re being filmed, as if the camera’s hidden and they’re being observed from a distance like a tribe in the Brazilian rainforest who have no contact with the outside world and are best understood if they’re left undisturbed to go about their traditional ways. The narrator speaks in an almost affectless tone, as if being over-careful to sound completely nonjudgmental and his vocabulary is that of an anthropological or psychological case study. The serious, humorless, unironic, deadpan, detached, ostensibly unbiased and professionally objective tone is at odds with the intimate and emotional comedy being played out, which is the joke. Allen made a movie built around the same joke. His first one.

Chapter Fourteen.

All joking aside, Listen Up Philip depends on our being able to put up with Philip for nearly two hours. That challenge to our patience and tolerance is made easier by his being played by Jason Schwartzman who is somehow able to get away with Philip’s meanest lines. Reacting to news of the death of the subject of an interview he was counting on doing for the money and exposure it would bring to him, Philip says, “I’m glad he’s dead and all, but it would have been a great opportunity for me. Last interviews are hard to get”, and Schwarztman almost makes us feel Philip’s pain.

Some of it is due to his being pint-sized. He’s too small to take seriously as the menace he wants to be, coming across as endearingly and pathetically ineffectual in his hostility, like a terrier straining at his leash and yapping at a passing Great Dane he means to chase from his territory.

Some it is due to the naiveté he’s able to bring to the role. Philip seems to sincerely believe that his narcissism, cynicism, and anger are attractive qualities and reasonable responses to the way life is and he can’t understand why people refuse to see things his way.

But some of it, at least for me, is the reservoir of good will he’s able to draw from thanks to his three seasons as the star of HBO’s Bored to Death.

Chapter Fifteen.

On Bored to Death, Schwartzman played Jonathan Ames, another young novelist at odds with himself and disappointed with his own writing and the direction of his career. Like Philip, Jonathan is a solipsist and an egotist with a penchant for saying the wrong thing and a habit of thinking it’s all about him. He’s bitter and angry too. But unlike Philip, he is basically decent and kind-hearted and instead of sulking through his life, he tries to get out of his own head by going out of his way to help others, although in a self-romanticizing way by taking up a second career as an unlicensed private detective.

He’s active and, although cautious because he’s usually aware he’s overmatched in almost any situation, brave. And he’s likeable with good friends whose friendship is worth having and it’s not surprising that he gets the girl from time to time.

Naturally, I couldn’t help drawing the thematic parallels. I began to imagine Jonathan and Philip as alter egos of each other. And I went back and forth between wondering which was the invention of which. I could see Listen Up Philip as an episode of Bored to Death in which Jonathan is at work on a short story about the kind of successful novelist he dreams of being when he’s not afraid of becoming that kind of successful writer and I could see Bored to Death as a dramatization of a novel by Philip Lewis Friedman in which Philip portray himself as he actually sees himself, a nice and decent guy doing his best in a hostile world designed to thwart him at every turn.

In the end, I decided that Philip doesn’t have the sense of humor, sympathy, and detachment to imagine himself as a comic failure while Jonathan has all the angst, self-doubt, and innate decency needed to imagine himself as such a shit-heel.

And that’s how I finally came to enjoy Listen Up Philip, as a sequel to Bored to Death…

When I wasn’t enjoying it as that Philip Roth novel Philip Roth never wrote.

I have a vague memory of Underdog’s forearm deflating one year, but don’t recall any other balloon disasters this dire:

During one of the first [Macy’s] Thanksgiving Day Parades, organizers thought it would be a good idea to end the festivities by letting go of the ropes and watching the balloons fly away. As they rose into the sky, most of them popped from the air pressure, leaving dozens of children stunned and saddened watching their favorite cartoons blow up in front of them.

This is a photo from the second parade in 1928. Not sure if that’s the parade when the balloons were released and I don’t know who the character in front is. His costume looks a little Arabian Nights-ish so maybe he’s that era’s Aladdin.

By the way, Hendrickson thinks the Aladdin character might have been intended to be the comedian Eddie Cantor. Could be, but I think that changes the date of the photo. Vazquez has it as 1928. Hendrickson says 1934. But Cantor starred in a movie called Ali Babba Goes to Town in 1937.

Haven’t we seen Robert Downey Jr doing this in the Iron Man movies, not to mention The Avengers? Why, yes we have, and that’s the joke: Tony Stark and the Avengers have nothing on Hiro Hamada and his team of scientists turned superheroes in the latest cartoon feature from Disney, Big Hero 6.

As cartoons featuring a team of superheroes learning to work together go, Big Hero 6 is no The Incredibles.

But as cartoons featuring innocent-as-a-child, self-sacrificing, highly-weaponized flying robots and a team of superheroes learning to work together that pay respectful but subtle tribute to The Iron Giant and The Incredibles go, Disney’s latest animated feature, Big Hero 6, is all its own good thing, very well-done, and lots of fun.

Big Hero 6 is based on a Marvel comic book but the animators weren’t religious about staying true to their movie’s graphic origins. (FYI, though: despite the stylistic differences between comic and film, Big Hero 6 is still a Marvel superhero movie, which means there’s a cameo by Stan Lee. You’’ll need to keep your eyes open for it. It goes by in a Quicksliver hurry. ‘Nuff said.) Visually, it’s ambitious. There’s a terrific amount to look at in every shot, if you look for it, which you’re not forced to. Probably, when it comes out on DVD if you freeze any scene for study, you’ll find frames that are as crowded with entertaining imagery as a painting by Brueghel, but as the movie flies by the foreground is as sharp, clean, vivid, and focused as the best hand-drawn Disneys and the characters and main action don’t get lost in any confusion. For the most part. The climactic battle gets a little messy. The destruction isn’t as wanton as in Man of Steel but it goes on too long to little effect except effect. The artwork is such that the movie looks like itself and not like any or every other animated feature, although there’s just enough of a touch of Disney that references to Frozen and other Disney classics slip in without calling the wrong sort of attention to themselves and there’s not a little Pixar influence at work---just as a for instance, our hero Hiro Hamada’s Aunt Cass bears more than a passing resemblance to Mrs Incredible when she’s not extending herself. Despite the cast’s including James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Maya Rudolph, and Damon Wayans Jr., the voice work is undistinguished, It’s the animation and the writing that bring the characters to life as individuals. My favorite of the supporting players would have been Fred, the rich kid science buff, comic book fanboy, and all-around bro who gives the team their most important superpower, the one Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne give to Iron Man and Batman: money. But the writers take the joke a little too far with him. So my favorite’s Wasabi (voiced by Wayans) who at first seems too fussy and cautious to be a superhero but who when pressed into action turns out to have the most superheroic temperament and to be a natural chief executive officer, a field commander who can be counted on to take charge of that part of the fight where the team’s leader can’t be because he’s out of commission or busy elsewhere taking care of a bigger threat: sort of an even straighter-arrow Scott Sommers to Hiro’s teenage whiz kid Professor X.

And the villain is awesome!

Yokai is visually imposing and truly frightening. In a film laced with humor, laugh outloud funny in many places, Yokai is in no way a joke. The moviemakers treat him with complete seriousness. In fact, part of his terrifying effect is the way he defeats humor, driving it from his scenes, like Sauron brushing aside an attack by the elves, as if comedy is a force for good, the heroes’ incorporeal ally rendered hopeless and ineffective. And even though both sets of Spider-Man movies aren’t Disney properties---or even Marvel movie properties, exactly---Yokai owes a lot to Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, carried along on striding tentacle-like machine legs, ankle-length overcoat billowing. Yokai is also a sly reference to The Incredibles in that this is one villain who’ll never lose focus by being tricked into monologuing.

But the movie’s main hero,the innocent-as-a-child, selfless robot Baymax, who is a big hero but not, as I thought going in, because I wasn’t familiar with the comic book, the Big Hero 6 of the title---Big Hero 6 is the name of the team---gives Big Hero 6 its heart and soul.

Doing a near perfect imitation of pre-psychotic break HAL from 2001, Scott Adsit gives Baymax his voice, soothing, ingratiating, unexcitable, maddeningly reasonable, infuriatingly literal, and essentially clueless about how the humans he’s programmed to take care of think and feel. Baymax was built to be a home health care device, a combination nurse and walking first aid cabinet---Baymax is activated by the sound of humans expressing physical distress and won’t deactivate until he hears his patient assure him “I am satisfied with my care.”---and much of the comedy involves Baymax’s insistence on being true to his programming even when the situation seems to require more of him than a calm bedside manner. But Baymax’s best moments come when he doesn’t talk or when what he says doesn’t really matter. He’s at his funniest and most himself when he moves. Delicate even dainty of touch, light on his feet despite his size and apparent bulk because he’s made of vinyl and deflatable for easy storage, always patient and careful and therefore not always quick to react, Baymax is a great silent movie comic.

That’s about it. I don’t have much more to say about the film. Regular readers will know how rare that is for me, how I can almost always find more to say about a movie. Wait till I post my review of Listen Up Philip. But, really, that’s it: it’s fun, go see it.

Oliver Mannion, who gives Big Hero 6 the thumbs up, thinks I could have gotten away with saying a lot less. He recommended a one-sentence review:

At rogerebert.com, Craig Lindsay’s appreciation of the best cartoon featuring an innocent-as-a-child, highly-weaponized, self-sacrificing flying robot, which also happens to be one of the best animated movies of the last thirty years and maybe of all time: “The Iron Giant” to the rescue.

Brooks’ job is not to provide a conservative voice to sing counterpoint in the generally liberal chorus of the New York Times editorial pages. It’s to provide liberal readers the fun of hearing the sound of our own voices.

He writes a column and we react, in derision, in scorn, in anger---although his usual stuff is so slight it’s hardly worth getting angry about---with laughter, with snark, with a self-congratulating recitation of facts, with a pompous and self-regarding reiteration of a lesson from our favorite college class, with a self-satisfying reference or quote, “reminding” Brooks of something he should have read himself or that he did read but misread or is misremembering.

Of course, there’s no expectation that Brooks will read what we wrote or give it much thought if he does. The point isn’t for him to get schooled. It’s for us to have fun being smarter than David Brooks. Brooks is writing for our amusement, just not in the usual sense of that phrase. He’s giving us material to amuse ourselves with. It’s a sport.

This is why his writing is so shallow and his arguments, if you can call them arguments, so easily refuted. What’s going on here is target practice, not big game hunting.

There’s no sign in anything he writes that he cares if readers agree or disagree with him. No sign he actually believes any of what he writes himself. He takes the same pride in one of his op-eds as a gamekeeper takes in skeet. You can practically hear him cry “Pull!” as he hits the enter key at the end of a paragraph.

He lets the words fly and we blast away.

And when it’s over we pack up our hampers with the columns we’ve shot full of holes and return home to sit by the fire with a drink and congratulate ourselves on a good day’s shoot.

What I’m saying is the New York Times doesn’t keep him around to write columns. He’s there to generate commentary. On blogs, on Twitter, in the Times’ letters page, in the space under his columns on the website. He’s good at it, too. And we enjoy it!

According to Iowa’s new Senator-elect, Joni Ernst, Iowa has changed a lot since I was in grad school there. It’s become a state of godless, selfish, callous, and uncharitable assholes who don’t go to church, don’t care about anybody but themselves, are indifferent to others’ suffering, neglect their own families, and can’t be bothered to give to food pantries or contribute to clothing drives. She doesn’t mention it but they probably don’t put anything in the boxes for Toys for Tots and make the Marines cry.

“We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”

Ernst wasn’t a small girl when I was in grad school, but she was only in junior high, so it’s probable she was thinking about other things at the time, but you’d think she’d have noticed that the salient economic event in Iowa in the 1980s was the failure of thousands and thousands of family farms. She might also have overheard some grownups talking about how the Reagan Administration’s economics team regarded it as a good thing all those families were losing their livelihoods and their homes because it was weeding out the “inefficient.” Ronald Reagan, the great Nostalgic, champion of traditional, small town, family values, supposedly leading America back to the glorious days of his own idyllic boyhood in an America defined by small towns and family farms, friendly Main Streets and crowded church pews, was, with his patented genial chuckle, presiding over an epidemic of foreclosures, the economic devastation of many small towns and the shuttering of countless businesses on every Main Street across Iowa, and the overwhelming of churches’ ability to help the inefficient among their congregants. You’d think someone at Ernst’s church might have pointed out to her that those “wonderful” food pantries and clothing drives were helping people who only a year before were hardworking, self-reliant members of the middle class put food on their tables and bundle up their kids in jackets and coats, hats and mittens before sending them out to wait for the bus in the cold and dark of a Midwestern winter made colder and darker by the need to turn off the lights and turn down the heat in order to save on the heating and electric bill.

The reason Ernst doesn’t see what she remembers happening anymore is that it never happened to begin with, not in the way she imagines. She’s remembering a desperate response to an economic crisis that wiped out a whole way of life as if it was a barn-raising complete with a potluck picnic and a soundtrack by Aaron Copeland.

I haven’t spent significant time in Iowa since I left there with my MFA, but here in upstate New York people still go to church, still donate food, time, and money to food pantries, contribute to clothing drives, and take care of their families and look out for their neighbors, and I can’t believe that the good folks of Iowa are more godless, uncharitable, and heartless than we are here in the our socialized dystopia.

Clothing and food drives are good things and it would be nice if churches could do more to help the members of their communities who are in need---although I’m not sure how Ernst expects churches to give flu shots and treat cancer---but our problem here isn’t that folks aren’t compassionate or generous. It’s that we can’t keep up. There’s too much misery, too many people who need help. I’m guessing things are the same in Iowa.

Of course, Ernst, who, by the way, paragon of self-reliance and true believer in getting government out of people’s lives that she is, collects at least two government paychecks, one from the state of Iowa for serving in the state senate and the other from the U.S. Army and the National Guard, and will soon be on the federal government gravy train---she’s also a graduate of a state university, but of course boasts of having worked her way through school with no government aid--- isn’t talking about a real Iowa, either the one in the past where she grew up or the one she’s about to represent in the United States Senate in the present. She’s describing fantasylands conjured up out of her dreams and nightmares.

Enst’s epitomizes the qualities of the conservative mindset: Nostalgia, sentimentality, and fear bordering on terror of the complexities, changes, and messiness of real life, combining to create a desire to retreat into a childishly idealized past.

“Things were better when I was a kid. Let’s go back in time.”

You notice how she refers to her past self as a “small girl”? Sentimentalizing, idealizing, and infantilizing themselves is another habit of conservatives. It gives the game away.

It’s not the traditional values and solid virtues of the past they miss and would like to see restored.

It’s their childhoods.

______________________________

Updated after mature consideration: It’s possible I was too easy on Ernst by treating her as a mere sentimentalist and nostalgic and not giving her enough credit for her demagoguery. There’s a good chance a thorough perusal of her remarks would turn up qualifiers, implicit and explicit, that let her voters know she wasn’t talking about them, she was talking about THEM, those Others, the godless and heartless and negligent living in places like Upstate New York., because if there’s another thing that epitomizes Right Wingers like Ernst it’s a knack for Other-ing and Them-ifying their fellow Americans.

_______________________________

For an idea of what life was really like in Iowa when Joni Ernst was a girl see The Farm Crisis at Iowa Public Television.

I’m getting there. It’s going to need pruning though. It’s on its way to being another patented Mannion movie review that takes longer to read than to watch the movie. Right now it includes an extended riff on the life of a young writer that probably won’t survive the final edit and which includes this bit:

If you’re lucky you’ll have some true believers among your family and friends. They’ll support you and encourage you and love what you do. They’ll cheer your success and cry with you over your failures.

If you’re lucky in another way, someone important to you will be overtly hostile to your dreams and ambitions. They’ll dismiss your work, deny you have the talent or the character or the ability to make your own luck. They’ll make you want to show them and keep on showing them. They’ll drive you on with their doubt.

But most people you care about and who you thought cared about you will be worse than indifferent.

They won’t even notice you’re doing what you’re doing.

It’s the paragraph that begins “If you’re lucky in another way…” that’s the point here. Some young artists are lucky in having people opposed to their becoming an artist who stand in their way or try to. It makes them mad and they channel their anger. It energizes them and makes them determined.

Like I said, this is probably a target of the delete key, but I’ve been re-thinking since I read this passage this morning in The Last Train to Zona Verde, my favorite curmudgeonly travel writer Paul Theroux’s latest travel book about what he’s pretty sure was his final trip to Africa where, he believes, his career as a writer really started, almost fifty years ago, and it may have gotten started there because he was lucky in that other way:

As a young man, I never entertained the idea of death in travel. I had set off for Africa almost fifty years ago with the notion that my life had at last begun, that I was free in this great green continent, liberated from my family and its paternalism just at the time many African countries had liberated themselves from the paternalistic hand of colonialism. And when Africans told me how they had been repressed, confined, belittled, exploited, and infantilized by their colonial overlords, be it Britain, Belgium, Portugal, or France, I thought of my fierce mother saying, “It’s your own damn fault” and “You’re not going anywhere---you have no gumption,” and my father saying, “Get a job---money doesn’t grow on trees” and “Why are you so defiant?” and “Why do you write trash?”

Another Tuesday, another with the New York State Thruway Authority. 240 miles up to Syracuse. 240 back. If you can help with the gas and tolls, it' be much appreciated. I thank you, my car thanks you, the Thruway authority thanks you, ExxonMobil thanks you, and, believe it or not, my students thank you. Really. They're always glad to see me hobble in the door. They like class. They like SCHOOL! What can I tell you? They're honors students. They're a little odd.

The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail---in every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data. We hadn’t had a season like it since somebody stumbled upon the new Miss America nude in an old issue of Penthouse, pictures of her elegantly posed on her knees and on her back that forced the shamed young woman to relinquish her crown and go on to become a huge pop star. Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism---which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security---was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one year old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne…identified in the incipient country of long ago as “the persecuting spirit”; all of them eager to enact the stringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again…

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop, when the speculating and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn’t stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered “Why are we so crazy?,” when men and women alike, awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a massive banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. It was the summer when---for the billionth time---the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one’s ideology and that one’s morality. It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, it all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.

My favorite curmudgeonly travel writer curmudgeons his way back to Africa:

But I had yet other reasons [for making the trip], just as pressing. The main one was physically to get away from people wasting my time with trivia. “I believe the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Life Without Principle,” “so that all our thoughts be tinged with triviality.”

In going away I wanted to frustrate the stalkers and pesterers, to be unobtainable and not live at the beck and call of emailers and phoners and people saying “Hey, we’re on deadline!”---other people’s deadline, not mine. To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, that is bliss.

I mean “Something the conventionally wise in the political press corps want to think happened but I think didn’t happen.”

What happened was that in a low-turnout election in states with a lot of Republicans more Republicans didn’t not turn out than Democrats; as a result, Republican candidates got more votes.”

The question is, what do the conventionally wise think happened that I think didn’t? What do they mean by a wave?

What is a wave?

Is it a synonym for landslide?

Is it a reversal of a tide or a shifting of the current current?

Is it a sea change?

Yes to all three, because it’s being used in all three ways by different commentators, although many commentators can’t make up their minds and switch back and forth or intend all three meanings simultaneously, not because their thinking is complex and they’re trying to distinguish between what the wave carried in or carried out or left undisturbed along a variety of shorelines but because their thinking’s confused. Others make a practice of saying everything and anything that comes to mind so that they can be sure they must be right in some way and can weasel out of having been fantastically stupid and wrong if they’re called on it later.

“Sure, I said this fantastically stupid and wrong thing. But if you look closely, you’ll see I also said…”

There’s another way wave is used: to be meaningless.

It’s a pundit’s trick to get past having to explain something and be right.

In the Insider Journalist’s art of instant “analysis” all interpretations of facts are intended to prove the pre-existing narrative. This election was about voters’ disillusionment with President Obama so all the returns everywhere must reflect that. But the returns everywhere don’t show that. They show different things happened in different places. How do you explain that?

You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter. It was a wave.

What happened in Arkansas? A wave.

What happened in Iowa? A wave.

What happened to Martha Coakley in Massachusetts? A wave.

What happened to Mark Warner in Virginia? A wave.

What happened in states where Democrats won? Never mind those states. This was a wave year.

A wave is a cliché, one of those stock phrases journalists and pundits use reflexively thinking they’re shortcuts around complex thoughts but which actually short-circuit thought. Boots on the Ground. Game-changer. Double-down. Wave year. This is what clichés do. They trick us into thinking we’re thinking.

But they sound colorful. They sound poetic. They sound demotic. They sound like they must mean something.

For many consumers of television news and commentary the sound is enough. They’d rather hear something that sounds like a thought than something that requires thought. They don’t want to think; they just want to know. If they hear it on TV it must be true and worth knowing.

Now they know.

“It was a wave.”

And the people saying it on TV like the sound of it too. They like it because they said it. They like the sound of their own voices. A lot of people talk just to hear themselves talk and a lot of those people are attracted to careers as politicians and TV pundits.

Most clichés are metaphors that have gone stale. They’ve been worn out, hollowed out, drained of meaning, by overuse or misuse or by changes in idioms or in the physical world to which they once referred. Metaphors are what we use to connect abstract thoughts to the world in which we live. We need them to help us understand because we are bodied creatures and can only truly understand what our bodies know. The problem is they can be apt but never exact.

The best metaphors connect the physical to the physical.

All the world’s a stage…

Well, no it isn’t.

But, yes, of course, it is.

Metaphors help us deal with ideas as if they are things. They help us see, feel, hear, sense our way toward understanding. But even the best metaphors, the most apt, carry us so far. There comes a point when we have to abandon the metaphor and think.

When we don’t give up a metaphor, when we tie ourselves to its mast and convince ourselves we’ve saved ourselves and the ship from crashing against the rocks of incomprehension, when we treat the comparison as if it’s the same as the abstraction all thought is scuttled and goes down with all hands.

But our private conversations, between father and son, are free of the disingenuous concessions of dinner parties. Metaphors their place, he says, but never as explanations, never as substitutes for the thing itself, which is the only thing that can turn on the lights or leave us in the dark. His suspicion of metaphors recognizes that our proclivity toward them probably springs from our very nature, which is given to analogize, to link one thing with another, and to make whole the disparate. But exercising this instinct is not the same as giving an explanation.

"It's about the whole, entire age of the earth," says Jun Ye, the scientist here at JILA who built this clock. "Our aim is that we'll have a clock that, during the entire age of the universe, would not have lost a second."

But this new clock has run into a big problem: This thing we call time doesn't tick at the same rate everywhere in the universe. Or even on our planet.

"It's about the whole, entire age of the earth," says Jun Ye, the scientist here at JILA who built this clock. "Our aim is that we'll have a clock that, during the entire age of the universe, would not have lost a second."

Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That's because speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.

The relative nature of time isn't just something seen in the extreme. If you take a clock off the floor, and hang it on the wall, Ye says, "the time will speed up by about one part in 1016."

That is a sliver of a second. But this isn't some effect of gravity on the clock's machinery. Time itself is flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor. These differences didn't really matter until now. But this new clock is so sensitive, little changes in height throw it way off. Lift it just a couple of centimeters, Ye says, "and you will start to see that difference."

This new clock can sense the pace of time speeding up as it moves inch by inch away from the earth's core.

Tuesday. November 11. New posts below. But before you scroll down, please read this.

O Dark Thirty and time to pack up the Manniomobile and get on the road to Syracuse. A little help with the gas and tolls would be much appreciated.

As I've been saying, in a few weeks things are going to start looking up here in Mannionville and I'll have news about that Thursday. But until things get better, they're going to continue to be very difficult.

This is the map of Massachusetts showing the results of the gubernatorial election in which the Republican wave carried away the Democratic nominee, Martha Coakley, drowning her hopes forty-one thousand votes deep. That’s about as close to the bottom of the sea as a Democrat in Massachusetts can get. And people have been pointing to her loss as evidence that this year’s election was a Republican wave.

Look! A Republican governor in the bluest of blue states! That must mean the tide’s turned everywhere!

Mitt who?

Massachusetts has a tradition of electing Republican governors and of not electing Martha Coakley to any office higher than Attorney General. Coakley’s been submerged before. If you’re not from Massachusetts, you might not remember that back in January of 2010, just as the Affordable Care Act was about to come to a vote in the Senate---where it was going to need a supermajority of 60 Democratic votes to overcome Republican filibustering and which the Democrats had until---she lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to the Incredible Mr Scott Brown, who two years later went and lost it to Elizabeth Warren, so I guess Coakley did the Bay State and the country a favor in a roundabout way. But that was still a feat, losing Ted Kennedy’s seat and sinking the Affordable Care Act in the process. What we call the ACA is really the PPACA---the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act---passed by a feat of legislative legerdemain that slipped it by the filibusters Scott Brown was now on hand to uphold.

Brown, as you know, moved up to New Hampshire where he rode the Republican wave to a dousing by Jeanne Shaheen who Republicans and their toadies in the press corps believed or wanted us to believe was as vulnerable as Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, or Kay Hagen.

Anyway, there’s a lot of red on that map. But look at this map.

Nothing but blue from Provincetown to Lenox.

This is the map showing the results of the Senate election. Democrat Ed Markey won re-relection over Republican Brian Herr who was so buoyed up by the Republican wave he lost by only half a million votes.

The Republicans did pick up a few seats in the state legislature. But after governor and lieutenant governor they lost every other top office, including Attorney General, Coakley’s job until she decided that the people who hadn’t wanted her as their senator wanted her for their governor.

That’s not a Republican wave washing through. It’s barely a ripple.

Over in Illinois, there was a similar ebb and flow. Democratic governor Pat Quinn was drowned. But Democratic Senator Dick Durbin was re-elected, although he barely kept his head above water, winning by only 350,000 votes.

The Republicans also picked up a House seat. But the state legislature stayed solidly Democratic and Bruce Rauner, the new Republican governor, will have to deal with veto-proof super-majorities in both the House and the Senate. He won’t be able to govern as a conservative Republican any more than Baker will in Massachusetts. (I don’t think Baker wants to. Massachusetts Republicans aren’t like, say, South Carolina Republicans or even New York Republicans.) The politically savvy voters of Illinois and Massachusetts knew this when they went to the polls, which means their way of expressing their anger at President Obama and Democrats in general was to vote to continue Democratic control of their state governments.

Meanwhile, up in Michigan, Republican Rick Snyder kept the governorship but Democrat Gary Peters was elected the state’s new senator by thirteen percentage points. And out in New Mexico Republican Governor Susana Martinez was re-elected with a fifteen percent margin of victory but Democratic Senator Tom Udall was also re-elected, although by only an eleven point margin.

What I’m getting at is that if, as the conventionally wise spinning for the Republicans are trying to have it, this was a Republican wave year---instead of what the numbers say it was, a year in which turnout dropped to a near historical low but lower among Democrats than among Republicans, and Republican states voted Republican and Democratic states voted Democratic but there were just more Republican states voting---and voters everywhere, including blue states, were expressing their disapproval of President Obama, then wouldn’t you think it would have been smarter and more effective for them to have done it with their senate votes? If the people of Massachusetts and Illinois had had enough of our Socialist President, shouldn’t they have sent him some opposition rather than a couple of staunch allies?

The more likely explanation for what happened in Massachusetts and Illinois---and Michigan and New Mexico---is that the voters there weren’t sending messages to anyone but the people they voted into or out of office.

Martha Coakley lost because people in Massachusetts didn’t want her as their governor not because they didn’t want Barack Obama as their President anymore.

Nothing explains Maine. How that idiot Paul LePage got himself re-elected is beyond me. Maybe there was a Republican wave there.

I don’t mean to minimize what happened Tuesday. It was a bad day for Democrats, the President, and the country. The conventionally wise have been reassuring us that now that the Republicans have gotten their way they’ll stop throwing temper tantrums and start acting like grownups, but I don’t know where they get this idea. Republican controlled state legislatures have been demonstrably and deliberately destructive and they show every sign of becoming more so, and I don’t see why a Republican controlled Congress will be any different. A Senate majority that includes Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner along with Ted Cruz isn’t likely to be able to moderate itself. But this situation isn’t something we have to resign ourselves to because “the People have spoken.”

The People did speak but they didn’t all say the same things and it’s important to be clear about what they said.

I believe voters in red states were sending an anti-Democratic, anti-Obama message, which was: Hey, we’re still Republicans and we still don’t like you. Which is the same message they sent in 2012…and 2010…and 2008. They weren’t saying anything new. They were simply repeating themselves, just a little louder.

The blue states did the same and so did the purple states: We’re what we were before.

That still leaves Iowa and Colorado to explain and I can’t. But Iowa isn’t as blue as people might think. It has been a basically Republican state with a habit of occasionally sending liberals to Congress and a tendency over the last seven Presidential election cycles to vote for the Democratic candidate for President---and that’s the thing: it’s a tendency but not necessarily a given. John Kerry lost there. That’s why Republicans eye it as a possible pickup every four years. Iowans have a Republican governor, a sitting Republican Senator, and two Republican Congresspersons (in a delegation of four), until January, when they will have three to the Democrats’ one, and one of those Republicans is the racist, xenophobic demagogue Steve “Calves the Size of Cantalopes” King, who was just re-elected with 60 percent of the vote. I’m thinking, though, that there’s been a demographic shift out there, just as there’s been in several formerly red states, only in the opposite direction as the population’s grown older and, if it’s possible, even whiter, that’s making it more consistently Republican. Colorado has been in transition for a while now too, trending more blue but still with large swaths of purple and red. Mark Udall lost his senate seat, but John Hickenlooper was re-elected governor, which is more what I’d expect if the voters’ mood was anti-Obama or if Democrats didn’t come out to vote.

Maryland was another one I couldn’t fathom until I read this New Republic article by Alec McGinnis. Apparently, voters there were expressing their disapproval of a leading Democratic politician, but it wasn’t President Obama. It was outgoing governor Martin O’Malley who in at least one way governed more like a Republican than a Democrat: rather than straight-forwardly raising income taxes for everyone or securing loans or issuing bonds, he financed things by nickel and diming taxpayers in ways that disproportionately socked the middle and working classes and the poor. That may have been politically and economically necessary (or expedient) but it didn’t make voters feel all warm and fuzzy towards him. McGinnis says the losing Democrat, Anthony Brown, was a weak enough candidate in his own right, but since Brown was O’Malley’s lieutenant governor, voters saw him as a surrogate for O’Malley and punished Brown the way they’d have liked to have punished O’Malley.

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

Yet everyone I spoke with cited it as the crowning example of the nickel-and-diming taxing regime under O’Malley that also includes the $60-per-year “flush tax” to upgrade sewage treatment plants and higher taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and gas. “The rain tax was the last straw,” said Mike Eline, 64, who does pest control at the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore. “How many taxes can there possibly be?” “It seems any reason they can, they say, ‘let’s tax the people,’” said Daniel, a 63-year-old African-American warehouse worker. “What really upsets me is the rain tax. Rain is something natural that’s just given to us. Nobody has to work for it. But they say, ‘let’s tax it.’”

Sometimes I have to write a post just to hear myself think so that I know what I think. This is one of those posts. I’m sorting some things out for future posts.

First off, to repeat what I said Thursday. What happened Tuesday was that states that voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election voted Republican again and states that voted Democratic in 2012 voted Democratic again, with two exceptions, Iowa and Colorado. There was almost a third, Virginia, which is going to be the point of this post. It’s just going to take me some time to get to it.

The other thing that happened was that nearly two-thirds of voters stayed home. Republicans and Democrats. It’s just that fewer Republicans stayed home in states where there happen to be more Republicans than Democrats to begin with.

I’m talking about the Senate races. The gubernatorial races are their own separate stories, and each one is a lesson in Tip O’Neill 101: All politics is local.

The Iowa and Colorado senate races probably are too.

At any rate, as you can see from the map, Tuesday was not an across the board disaster for Democrats. It wasn’t even a completely bad day for Democratic Senators named Udall. Tom Udall won re-election in New Mexico. Democrats won in twelve states (Louisiana will probably be lost in the runoff.) including states Republicans were talking confidently about being possible pick-ups back in the spring, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Michigan, and Oregon, and Minnesota and Virginia.

There’s no getting around it. Things could have gone better. The point is the Republican wave looks to have channeled itself through Republican waters. The map looks like it only needs a bit of filling in to be the map of the 2012 Presidential election results.

Again, Iowa and Colorado being important exceptions.

A conclusion to draw from this is that voters weren’t telling us anything new in this election. They were just repeating themselves, with emphasis.

That goes against the conventional wisdom which holds that this election was somehow a rejection of President Obama, but the conventionally wise often have trouble making up their minds and more trouble balancing competing thoughts.

Up until it became all about the polls and the polls were showing the Republicans were on their way to taking control of the Senate, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans needed to do more or, rather, do something, anything, to attract more women and minority voters.

But it depends on what you’re talking about, winning the White House or controlling Congress.

The two seemingly contradictory pieces of conventional wisdom don’t cancel each other out.

The conventional wisdom is often reliable when it’s describing the way things are, because the conventionally wise have the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight and are limited by the difficulty of making two plus two equal five and living in the world where it’s generally agreed upon that the sky is blue. (The conventionally wise, by the way, do not work for FoxNews.) It’s not so reliable or all that wise, for that matter, when it comes to figuring out how to change the way things are, often because the conventionally wise are not clairvoyant but they are biased, self-interested, self-promoting, and, in many cases, just plain dumb.

There are more states where the majority of voters are Republicans. There just are. But in many of those states there aren’t really a lot of Republicans because there aren’t a lot of people of any Party, period.

There are, of course, fewer states where the majority of voters are Democrats, but in a number of those states there are a lot of Democrats. There are a lot of people, period, but the majorities being what majorities are, that makes for a lot of Democrats.

The effect of these obvious facts is that all together the states with a lot of Republicans get to send a lot of Senators and Representatives to Congress and the states with a lot of Democrats have a lot of votes in the Electoral College.

I’m using “a lot” a lot deliberately.

So the Republicans have the edge when it comes to controlling Congress and the Democrats have the edge when it comes to winning the White House.

I know. Schoolhouse Rock level analysis.

Bear with me.

This means that for the Republicans to have a chance of winning the White House they need to carry some states where there are a lot of Democrats and for the Democrats to have a chance of controlling Congress they need to win in states where there are a lot of Republicans.

In order to do this they have to do two things that often work against each other: get their party’s voters to the polls and convince some of the other party’s voters to change their votes.

How to do both is the problem.

I happen to think the Democrats have the bigger problem because they already have a hard time convincing their own voters to come out to vote in mid-term elections.

How do we convince white male voters to vote Democratic without turning off women and minorities?

For the record, Democrats have a problem with white female voters too. Liberal analysts just tend to ignore it because they get caught up in their own conventional wisdom about the gender gap. But perhaps Democrats should be working on attracting more white female voters, which may be easier than attracting their husbands---the white women who present Democrats with the most challenge are married with children---not by appealing to their whiteness or even their femaleness but to their middle classness. The Republican War on Women is real and must be countered, but there are other worries, like jobs for themselves, jobs for their husbands, college educations for their kids, food on the table, mortgage payments due, they bring to the polls. As it turns out, addressing those worries brings Democrats to the polls.

That’s what Al Franken did in Minnesota and what Mark Warner in Virginia didn’t.

Franken won re-election handily. Warner came heart-stoppingly close to losing

Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel thinks it was because Warner didn’t figure out something Franken did, how to appeal to voters who voted for President Obama in 2012 and voters who didn’t.

In his two previous winning races, a 2001 governor bid and 2008 Senate landslide, Warner won swaths of conservative Virginia. Not this time. "A self-described 'radical centrist' who prided himself on his appeal among Republicans and independents," wrote Jenna Portnoy and Rachel Weiner, "Warner steadfastly continued to court those voters despite strong evidence that their tolerance for Democrats had dramatically waned." Every Warner faux-bit (faux obit) features something like this—that he is no longer the invincible centrist.

But it's not as if Warner was the only Democrat who had a stubborn 97 percent record of "voting with the president" and who also tried to run as a dealmaker. Minnesota Senator Al Franken made a similar argument to voters, describing himself as an aisle-crosser, talking up the bipartisan bills he'd pushed, telling audiences that he'd called Rand Paul right after the Kentuckian's 2010 win. Mike McFadden, a moderate Republican businessman who made no big mistakes and was highly rated by reporters looking for "sleeper" races (and who shared an ad-maker with Joni Ernst), never got close to Franken. The incumbent won by 10 points, bigger than the Obama-Biden margin in Minnesota in 2012. Warner had a 56 percent approval rating from the Virginia electorate, and won 49 percent of its votes.

Weigel acknowledges the differences in the electorates Franken and Warner had to deal with, although he doesn’t mention that Warner had many more African American voters to appeal to and that the appeals he made didn’t appeal enough---not enough to draw them to polls in the numbers that would have made his winning a whole lot easier and more of the sure thing he expected---and he doesn’t get into a significant bit of history, which is that Franken squeaked into office in 2008 riding Barack Obama’s coattails and that this time out, running without the President’s help, he won re-election handily, while Warner won in 2008 too but this time out, running without the President at the top of the ticket, he’s the one who faced possible endless recounts. The point is, though, that Franken won over voters who’d voted against him before and Warner lost voters who voted for him and for the President before without picking up voters who’d voted against him in 2008. But it’s Weigel’s conclusion that matters:

I'm not making a one-to-one comparison, but I do think Franken proved that voters respond to direct arguments about their economic angst better than they respond to promises that Washington is going to Fix the Debt.

The conventionally wise are already telling Democrats what they usually tell Democrats, that the way to win elections is to screw over their own base. Weigel’s suggesting that Democrats would be wiser to listen to Al Franken instead.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday blamed frustration with President Obama for the poor performance of Democratic candidates in New York, saying his victory fell short of a landslide because of discontent unrelated to the state.

“This was a real Republican wave that went across the country,” Mr. Cuomo said in a radio interview, offering his first public comments on the election since his victory speech on Tuesday.

He added that voters were motivated by “dissatisfaction with a Democratic administration in Washington, premised on economic anxiety.”

Lots of reasons I was happy to vote for Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins for governor, but Andrew’s contempt for teachers and public schools, his high-handed way of governing, the disrespect he showed Democratic voters and candidates by refusing to get out and seriously campaign in the primary and the general election, and his being the type of person who blames other people for his failures made me even happier to be able to vote against Andrew.